Some of my favourites are Void Linux, Artix and Opensuse Tumbleweed
Void was my first non-systemd distro, and it was super snappy as well. Some packages may not available but overall I had a really great experience with it. It also offers a version with the musl C library. Pretty cool if you ask me.
Opensuse tumbleweed is an overall a great distro, it’s one of my favourites. Also I noticed that many people have recommended it and that’s for a good reason. It’s installer isn’t that user friendly but I would prefer it over Fedora’s installer any day. ( I haven’t tried the last 3 iterations of Fedora, so it might have changed now )
Artix is well… arch with different init systems. Nothing too crazy. Its what I have been daily driving for the past year or so.
Bazzite. It’s based on Fedora uBlue so it’s technically Fedora, but being an immutable OS, it works quite differently enough that it counts as its own distro. For instance, you don’t use dnf or yum to install stuff, you’d use Flatpak/Distrobox/Nix. Updates are done using the rpm-ostree command, and it’s effectively a rolling release model, but atomic in nature so you get none of the instability that you’d get in a typical rolling release.
My reason against using Guix is software availability. NixOS repos are just larger, and I like that on NixOS unfree software can be enabled with a single line.
with nonguix the lines are like five instead of one, but yes there are less packages than nix. the real selling point imho is how everything is human-sized and consistent
Very intrigued by OpenSUSE as an alternative to Fedora. How do you think the two stack up against each other? Is it a noticeable leap switching between them?
I think functional distros like Guix or Nix are just another thing. Their ability of programming , provisioning and deploying software environments is unparalleled. My personal favorite is Guix since, while having less packages than Nix, it has the most consistent experience: everything is in Scheme from the top to the bottom of the distro. Also it pushes really hard on a sane bootstrapping story while allowing for impurity through channels like nonguix .
The main downside is the lack of tutorials and a documentation that’s very intense, let’s say. typical of GNU projects. I suggest the System Crafters youtube channel which has a lot of nice tutorials
I get that there are a lot of novel are cool distros out there, but I just stick with Debian (or one of the other well known distros that have been around for decades).
I do it because from a security standpoint, they have my trust. Maybe in 10-20 years with a good reputation and history, but it’s not there.
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